I watched Split Rock as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its North American premiere on October 21, 2026.
Written and directed by Ryan Glover, Split Rock is his second feature after The Strings, which was released in 2020 (and is available on Shudder). Split Rock is about a group of geologists – Lauren (Clark Backo), Ben (Drew Ray Tanner), Sam (Olivia Luccardi), and Trevor (Graham Verchere) – who are surveying an area of the Badlands in southern Saskatchewan. They’re exploring rock formations and measuring seismic activity in the region and, relatively early on, they find an anomalous rock – one they struggle to identify, one that shouldn’t be there. They theorize that it was dragged down into the region by a glacier. Even as the team talks about the rock in scientific terms, however, attempting to explain it rationally, bizarre things are happening at the camp. Lauren, especially, seems deeply affected by the presence of the rock, even as she too tries to explain what’s happening to them, to her, in scientific language.
The main characters (left to right): Trevor, Lauren, Ben, Sam
It first needs to be said about Split Rock that it is absolutely beautiful. It’s shot on 35 mm film, a choice Glover wanted to make anyway but which, as he said in the Q&A, also fit the harsh filming conditions in the Saskatchewan Badlands: it was hot, cold, dusty, windy, wet – every kind of difficult weather – and you can see some of that harsh weather manifest on the film itself.
The sound design is also amazing, replicating the eerie nature of the threat that confronts the geologists, which is first and foremost the rock itself. We hear rocks moving, rumbling, but there’s also a kind of unearthly shrieking sound that builds and then abruptly cuts off. The sound isn’t anything ‘natural,’ and does serve effectively to express the immense stretches of rocky landscape. If anyone has ever seen the brilliant 1970s British TV series, Children of the Stones (ITV, 1977), they might recognize that noise, an eerie crescendo, a wordless vocalization famously used in the series to evoke the uncanny power of megaliths. Glover has said that Children of the Stones is one of the texts he was tapping into when he made Split Rock.[i]
Split Rock is slow-burn horror, something I absolutely loved about it. The menace builds gradually and convincingly, emanating persistently from the wide and empty landscape. It serves to disrupt relationships that are well-developed and characters that we care about, so the palpable sense of threat is all the more terrifying. Despite the fact that Split Rock is, undoubtedly, slow-burn horror, there are also some terrifying eruptions of body horror (the one near the end of the film employing absolutely terrific practical effects), as well as some jump scares that really work.
Ben and Lauren
In a 2015 review, I called 127 Hours (Danny Boyle, 2010) “geological horror,” but Split Rock is a far more perfect incarnation of this kind of horror. Indeed, in its announcement about Shudder’s acquisition of Split Rock, IMDb calls it “geological horror.” It’s not a vastly populated subgenre, to be sure, although Vicenzo Natali’s 2019 In the Tall Grass (based on Stephen King and Joe Hill’s novella) is one other recent example. In Split Rock, the threat comes from rock – and does so convincingly. At one point, someone asks Lauren – the character who becomes most fatally bound to the rock – what she thinks it wants. She says, “It wants revenge.” After all, she continues, look at what we’ve done to our environment. In this moment, Split Rock thus becomes also a distinctive entry in the ‘revenge of nature’ category, one mostly populated by sharks and alligators (occasionally plants). If you think a rock can’t feature in such a film, well, watch Split Rock!
I mentioned above that the characters were well- developed – likeable – and I also want to point out their ordinariness. I was struck while immersed in new horror at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival how many films featured woman protagonists who were scarred, traumatized by some prior experience, usually of loss (I’m thinking here especially of The Cycle, Posthumous, and Erie – even Sender). Glover said in the Q&A that he was specifically interested in creating a protagonist who was not traumatized, not guilty, but one who was strong – super-intelligent. Nothing about what happens in the film serves as a metaphor for (or some consequence of) Lauren’s prior trauma. It’s about the landscape, the rock, and what it wants – it imagines it as some “ancient consciousness.” To get what it wants, it will remorselessly “erase” humans.
Lauren and the rock
Split Rock will appeal above all to fans of folk horror and the cosmic weird. Glover has said that his original inspiration for the film was John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987), but he also said he subsequently watched (and became fascinated with) the work of Nigel Kneale, especially The Stone Tape (1972) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967), as well as Children of the Stones and Stigma (1972). I mentioned to him that Split Rock also seemed to have the feel of Mark Jenkins’ Enys Men (2022) – and he said he loved that too.
I’ve seen some brilliant films at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. Split Rock was my favorite.
Split Rock has been acquitted by Shudder and will be available to stream on December 25, 2026.
[i] A personal communication via messaging on Instagram, October 22, 2026.
